Oven appliances generally include a cabinet that defines a cooking chamber for receipt of food items for cooking. Heating elements, such as gas burners, can be positioned within the cooking chamber to heat food items located therein. In certain oven appliances, a broil gas burner assembly is positioned at a top of the cooking chamber, and a bake gas burner assembly is positioned at a bottom of the cooking chamber. Broil gas burner assemblies can apply heat such that external surfaces of food items are seared without overcooking the interior of the food items. Thus, performance of a broil gas burner assembly can be measured by its ability to provide intense heat uniformly over a large area.
Certain oven appliances include broil gas burner assemblies having a single burner tube and a flame spreader positioned above the burner tube. The flame spreader can translate the convective heat of the burner tube's flames into radiant heat suitable for searing foods. Broil gas burner assemblies with a single burner tube can be inexpensive and easy to manufacture and/or prototype. However, the single burner tube is generally positioned down a center line of the oven appliance, and achieving intense heat uniformly in such a configuration can be difficult. In particular, food items positioned away from the oven appliance's center line can receive less heat intensity than those located relatively close to the oven appliance's center line because radiant heat intensity drops quickly with increasing distance from the broil gas burner assembly's flame spreader.
To avoid such drawbacks, certain oven appliances utilize non-tubular gas burners. Such non-tubular gas burners can distribute gaseous fuel over a larger effective area thereby spreading out the radiant energy generated by combustion of gaseous fuel over a larger area. However, such non-tubular gas burners can be costly to manufacture and prototype. Thus, such designs can have increased development times and thereby hamper modular use of such designs. Further, the relatively high cost of prototyping such designs can limit use of such designs on multiple oven sub-systems which may have different design needs.
In another approach, certain oven appliances include long burner tubes bent into various shapes to increase coverage of the oven appliances' broil heating assembly. This approach suffers from certain difficulties. In particular, outlet holes (ports) in gas burner assemblies are preferably consistent and uniform. In such designs, ports are generally punched in the long burner tubes prior to bending. However, once the long burner tubes are bent, the ports in the bent areas can deform. This can make port sizing in such regions difficult to control. Further, due to the excessively long lengths of such burner tubes, pressure gradients from fuel flowing through the burner tubes can create non-uniform flow out of the ports and uneven heating and burning of gaseous fuel can result.
Accordingly, an oven appliance having a broil gas burner assembly with features for providing intense heat uniformly over a large area would be useful. In particular, an oven appliance having a broil gas burner assembly with features for providing intense heat uniformly over a large area that is easy and inexpensive to produce would be useful.